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Breweries Not Too Big for Their Barrels

Left, John Chapman, left, Ethan Long, center, and Marcus Burnett, right, at Rockaway Brewery Company in Long Island. Right, Mr. Burnett and Mr. Long with kegs in front of the brewery.Credit
Michael Nagle for The New York Times

Every other Friday at 2 a.m., Rich Castagna walks out to the one-car garage behind his home in Maspeth, Queens, and fills a 55-gallon stainless-steel barrel with water. While his wife and three daughters are asleep inside the house, he fires up a burner and slowly brings the water to a boil, turning the 150-square-foot room into a sauna.

Mr. Castagna, who works for a New Jersey shipping company during the day, opened his one-man beer works in September, and has attracted an ardent following among New York’s craft-beer bars, with demand far exceeding the 45 or so gallons he can churn out in each batch. “All I can tell them now is, can you be a little patient,” he said. “It’s not easy keeping everyone happy.”

Bridge and Tunnel is one of nearly a dozen nanobreweries, or nanos, as they are known in the trade, to open in and around New York City in the last few years. They range in size from Bridge and Tunnel, with its 1.5-barrel capacity, to Port Jeff Brewing in Port Jefferson, on the North Shore of Long Island, a relative behemoth with its seven-barrel system. (Large craft breweries can produce 100 to 200 barrels at a time.) Across the country, more than 200 nanos are in operation or about to open.

“The best beer is coming out of these small breweries,” said Jimmy Carbone, whose East Village bar, Jimmy’s No. 43, usually has two or three local nanos on tap. “They have the passion.”

Nanos are the garage bands of the craft-beer world: basically souped-up home-brewing operations whose owners have decided to go commercial, but still hold tight to a do-it-yourself ethic. Working out of garages or small industrial spaces, they make a few small batches at a time, which they sell in kegs to local bars or to growler-bearing customers out their front doors.

As shoestring operations whose few employees often work day jobs elsewhere, nanobreweries can rarely guarantee consistent supplies. But in some ways that is part of their appeal, underlining the handmade, artisanal nature of their beers.

Indeed, Mr. Castagna was surprised when, a couple of months after hanging out his shingle, he began getting unsolicited orders from bars and restaurants. “I said: ‘You guys can have any beer you want on draft. Why me?’ And they said, ‘People want local beer.’ ”

Photo

A handful of hops.Credit
Michael Nagle for The New York Times

Bar owners love the personal relationships that come from working with tiny breweries. “The same guy is making the beer and delivering it,” Mr. Carbone said. “That’s what craft should be.”

Nanobrewing is an outgrowth of a nationwide upsurge in home brewing, said Gary Glass, the director of the American Homebrewers Association, where membership has grown 20 percent a year since 2005. In New York City, the number of home-brewing clubs has risen to 10 today, from 2 in 2001.

A result of all that activity is more information and knowledge sharing, as well as more and better brewing-supply stores, said Chris Cuzme, the brewer at 508 GastroBrewery in SoHo and a former president of the New York City Homebrewers Guild. That really launched the renaissance in nanobrewing, he said, as skilled hobbyists began looking for ways to take their passion to the next level.

It helps that many states have recently changed their post-Prohibition liquor laws, making it easier for small breweries to get started. Last year Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed a law easing taxes and fees for small breweries. Nanobreweries still have to meet state and federal licensing requirements. (They are spared local health inspections because beer is essentially antiseptic.)

Mr. Castagna needed a zoning variance to run a business on his property, and had to prove that his garage-cum-brewery was detached from his house. Finally, he had to pass a six-hour inspection before receiving his state license.

The slow-growing economy has limited how big a step start-up brewers can take. A typical new craft brewery, with a 30-barrel system and an automated bottling line, might cost upward of $1 million to open, not counting labor and space. “Credit has been an issue,” Mr. Glass said, “so launching a large brewery isn’t an option.”

A nanobrewery, in contrast, can start for as little as $10,000, depending on how much equipment the owners can make themselves. Mr. Castagna built his mash tub out of a barrel he bought from a Chinese restaurant. Other advantages to starting small besides price include the ability to experiment without too much at stake (or, in the case of home-based outfits like Mr. Castagna’s, without disturbing neighbors).

Photo

Left, Rich Castagna uses his garage in Maspeth, Queens, to brew his Bridge and Tunnel Brewery beer. Far right, inside the 150-square-foot brewery space.Credit
Michael Nagle for The New York Times

That urge to invent was the inspiration for Big Alice Brewing, a nano in a Long Island City, Queens, warehouse that used to store Bibles. “We opened the whole thing for the price of a car,” said Robby Crafton, who brews there when he is not working as an information technology specialist for a nearby air-conditioning company. “That way we can pursue our passion without any risk.”

Passion is the key word: the beer business is about volume, and at such a small level, it’s almost impossible to turn a profit, since the margins on keg sales to bars and restaurants is extremely low.

“We did a basic business plan, and we came to the conclusion that this was a horrible idea,” said Kyle Hurst, the head brewer at Big Alice.

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For now, Big Alice makes money through an innovative community-share program, in which customers order six-months’ worth of beer. Other brewers go directly to the public; Paul Dlugokencky, the owner of the Blind Bat Brewery in Centerport, on Long Island, sells his beer at nearby farm markets.

Many nanobrewers hope to grow quickly, using their proven demand to justify a loan to build a larger system.

“People told us that a 2-barrel system like ours wasn’t a winning concept,” said Ethan Long, an owner of the Rockaway Brewing Company, in an old bacon plant in Long Island City. “So for our next thing, we would love to make it a 15-barrel brewery.”

But for others, like Mr. Castagna, small is beautiful. He said he would like to move to a slightly bigger space, and maybe hire a couple of assistants, but stay tiny.

“I just want it to be a little bigger, to keep people satisfied,” he said. “I’m not looking to make this the next big thing.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 17, 2013, on Page D6 of the New York edition with the headline: Breweries Not Too Big for Their Barrels. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe